University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 20, 2005

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Contributor

More than 30 scholars from Asia and North America will gather today through Sunday in Buffalo for "The Roles and Representations of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity," a multidisciplinary exploration of the cultural, social and political meanings of walls in modern China.

The conference coincides with the opening tomorrow of "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art," a major exhibition of modern Chinese art that has two venues at UB—the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts and the UB Anderson Gallery located near the South Campus—as well as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Buffalo is the only North American venue for this exhibition, which comes to the United States from Beijing's Millennium Museum and features many works never before seen outside of China. The exhibition will run through Jan. 29.

The conference will explore "a broad range of dividing mechanisms," notes Thomas Burkman, director of the Asian Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences and an organizer of the conference. Participants, who hail from such fields as history, communication, medicine, Asian studies and comparative literature, will discuss ideological, political, cultural, medical and ethnic walls in China, Burkman adds, as well as address the issue of Internet walls, or "firewalls," which he defines as "walls erected in China to prevent the distribution of information on the Internet."

Arthur Waldron, author of the influential book "The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth," will present the keynote speech at 4:30 p.m. today in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts. A reception in the adjacent UB Art Gallery will follow.

In his keynote, Waldron, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, will reflect on the significance of the Great Wall in the 15 years since he wrote his book. While the Great Wall undoubtedly is China's most famous wall, its historical significance and original function are matters of dispute among scholars. Some claim that it was never a single, ancient structure, but rather a highly discontinuous series of structures that reached its peak in the 15th or 16th centuries. Others explore the Great Wall as a myth largely produced by Europeans, only later to become a key symbol of national identity.

Although Waldron's keynote on the Great Wall will kick off the conference, conference participants will go far beyond the Great Wall to look at all types of walls—physical and abstract. Sessions, to be held in the same three venues as the art exhibition, will discuss urban, cultural and legal walls in China, as well as their artistic, literary and cinematic depictions.

Papers to be delivered tackle issues as diverse as the Chinese government's silence on human rights issues, divisions in the domestic sphere, pathogens and "biological walls" in disease and health care, and the barrier between the self and others in poetry. Participants will examine some of the economic divisions facing China as well.

"We see it (the conference) as a step toward more global awareness on the part of the university," says Roger Des Forges, a conference organizer and UB professor of history.

Walls arose as a central symbol in modern Chinese art and culture in the 1980s, Des Forges notes. In 1984, China's Deng Xiaoping, an advocate of reform and openness, issued a call to the People's Republic to "love our China and restore our long wall(s)." In the two decades since then, as the nation has continued to transition from state socialism to a market economy, Chinese artists have used representations of various walls as a way to express themselves and their take on modern issues.

Xiaoping's proclamation represents a deep change in modern China's perception of walls, according to Des Forges.

"There were a great many walls broken down in the 1950s and 1960s," he explains, most notably the walls around the cities of Shanghai and Beijing. The Chinese government let the Great Wall fall into disrepair as well. The stone and earth from these structures were put to what was thought to be better use as materials for roads or agriculture. However, in the 1980s, citizens started to take pride again in China's walls as symbols of national achievement and history, Des Forges says. No longer were they seen only as barriers to progress or communication. Today, efforts to preserve ancient walls thrive.

"What we have now are two different concepts of modernity," says Des Forges—one that sees walls as barriers to progress, the other that views them as an important symbol of China's past.

"We're exploring (during the conference) some of these interactions of the past and present," explains Des Forges.

The conference will conclude at 3 p.m. on Sunday in Clifton Hall in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery with a closing keynote from Minglu Gao, associate professor of modern and contemporary Chinese art at the University of Pittsburgh, curator of "The Walls" art exhibition and former assistant professor of art history at UB.

Burkman says observers are welcome at the conference without registration and without cost. For more information on times and locations, go to http://cas. buffalo.edu/depts/asianstudies or call the Asian Studies Program at 645-3474.

The conference is cosponsored by the UB Art Galleries, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, WLS Spencer Foundation, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, College of Arts and Sciences, Asian Studies Program, Department of History, Department of Art History, Julian Park Chair in Comparative Literature, the Humanities Institute and the Mentholatum Company, Inc.